With 12.000 pictures classified and carefully tagged in Photoshop Album starter 2.0 on a PC running Windows Xp, I'm now migrating to a new PC running Windows7.

Installing the software and all pictures was easy, but there are no tag anymore !!

To keep those tags ( a lot of days of work ), would it be effective to upgrade on my old PC to Photoshop Elements, and after, migrate on the new one Photoshop Elements ? Is it safe to upgrade to Elements ( won't I loose, not my pictures, but my tags ) ? Will Elements create files with the tags, so I can easily copy and migrtae those ?

The tags are in a database file (I think it was MS Access, but am not 100% sure) that is maintained by Starter Edition. Since you only moved your files, you didn't bring all the tags over from the database, only tags that may have been embedded in the file itself.

You are correct that you would need to install Elements on your old system, however it is only able to read Starter Edition 3.x database files, so you would need to first upgrade your Starter Edition version to 3.x, THEN import using Elements. From there, you could backup the library, then restore on the new system to carry forward all the images and tags.

It won't be easy, however, since Adobe no longer distributes Starter Edition software; you may be able to google it to find an installer somewhere. A word of warning; if you do find the app and install it, it will only launch 25 or 30 times before locking you out of the trial version (and there is no longer a way to unlock it), so do all your converting or whatever you need to do without exceeding that limit.

I can't explain why the tags didn't come over, but one of two things could have happened, and you may need to do a little legwork to see which actually happened:

1. I dont' recall the Starter Edition interface, but is it possible that they are there, but you just didn't see them? Not likely, but at least a working theory at this point.

2. By default, the app will load the last working database; it's possible that there are multiple databases, and the one that was converted was not the right one. I don't recall the file extension of the Starter Edition database, but if you do a search for it by name, you may discover similar files. You could then try doing an "...Open As" command to open it with Starter Edition to confirm you have the one with all the tags. When you do, then you can download and install the Photoshop Elements trial, which would then auto-convert the last Starter Edition album you had open (the right one).

I finally was able to use my old catalog, created with Starter edition 2.0, with all his tags, on my new computer in Photoshop album Edition 3.2, and this works normally, but will stop after now less than 10 times using it ( as no more registration is possible ).

Photoshop Elements 9 is now running on my pc, BUT, when I try to convert the old catalog ( catalog.psa ), it fails with the following message : "The conversion failed cause the file of your catalog is corrupted. Try to fix it into your old software, and start again ". But, in my old software Album 3.2, there is no possibility to "repair" the catalog ..... And when I try "Open as" with PSE9, it says " This type of file is not supported ".

So, my catalog.psa which is indeed an MS access file cannot be converted in catalog.PSE9db. I was thinking that maybe an older version of Elements would be helpful, but I can't find any available trial. Any idea to help me further ?